Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Welcome to the Atomic Shop, where your real money can turn into cosmetic items and, soon, this one specific item that helps you win the game. (credit: Bethesda)

Since Fallout 76's release last November, the game's "Atomic Shop" has allowed players to use in-game currency and/or real-world money solely for cosmetic items like skins, costumes, and emotes. "It doesn't offer anything with a competitive advantage, and more so, it aims to bring joy not just to you, but the other dwellers around you" is how Bethesda's website describes the shop.

That seems set to change at least a bit with tomorrow's "Patch 8" update to the game, which will introduce a new Repair Kit utility item to the shop. While "Improved" Repair Kits can only be found through gameplay, "Basic" Repair Kits will be for sale in the Atomic Shop, offering instant restoration of any one item in your inventory to full durability.

That addition has some fans up in arms that developer Bethesda has broken a promise to keep so-called "pay-to-win" elements out of the premium game. As Bethesda's Pete Hines told Gamespot last October [emphasis added]:

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

Verizon launched its mobile 5G network last week in "select areas" of Minneapolis and Chicago, and a speed test shared by a Verizon spokesperson showed an impressive download speed of 762Mbps.

But the single speed test displayed by Verizon was conducted near a tower with clear line of sight to that tower. Actually finding a 5G signal elsewhere in Verizon's launch areas is much more difficult, according to tests by The Verge and CNET.

The two news organizations each had a reporter travel through the parts of Chicago where Verizon says its 5G network is ready. The results were disappointing.

Enlarge / A faint but colourful aurora from the Lofoten Islands, Norway, on March 10, 2018. (credit: VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images)

On Saturday, the leader of Norway's Labor Party said the party would stop pushing for oil exploration in the country's ecologically-sensitive Lofoten Islands, according to Bloomberg. Norway is a major oil producer, pumping more than 1.6 million barrels of oil per day from its oil-rich offshore areas.

Permission to conduct exploration missions in the waters off the Arctic Lofoten Islands has been at the top of the wish list for Norway's powerful oil industry. The waters have been estimated to contain a reserve of one billion to three billion barrels of oil, and state-owned oil company Equinor has said that exploiting Lofoten is key to maintaining Norway's status as an oil powerhouse in the future.

Norway is particularly invested in oil. The country maintains one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, built on the profits of the state's oil industry. The so-called Government Pension Fund has assets worth more than $1 trillion.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Crew Dragon approaches the International Space Station in March, 2019. (credit: NASA)

Nearly five years ago, NASA faced a difficult decision. The agency had spent about $1.5 billion to help Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation design spacecraft that could carry US astronauts to the International Space Station. As it sought to build flight hardware, NASA prepared to select just two providers to move forward—both to generate a healthy competition and provide redundant access to space.

NASA had a total of $7 billion to distribute to the winning companies to finalize development of their spacecraft, integrate their rockets, and each fly up to six missions after NASA certified the vehicles as space-worthy.

Publicly, some Boeing officials were denigrating SpaceX, emphasizing their own blue-blooded legacy. Boeing has had a successful working relationship with NASA dating back to 1961 and the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. By contrast, Boeing would note, Elon Musk seemed more interested in flashy marketing and never met his launch targets. "We go for substance," John Elbon, head of Boeing's space division, said at the time. "Not pizzazz."

Enlarge / There's really no difference between how the Ars front page looks in Edge and Chrome.

Microsoft's switch to using the Chromium engine to power its Edge browser was announced in December last year, and the first public preview build is out now. Canary builds, updated daily, and Dev builds, updated weekly, are available for Windows 10. Versions for other operating systems and a beta that's updated every six weeks are promised to be coming soon.

Chromium is the open source browser project run by Google. It includes the Blink rendering engine (Google's fork of Apple's WebKit), V8 JavaScript engine, Google's software-based sandboxing, and the browser user interface. Google builds on Chromium for its Chrome browser, and a number of third-party browsers, including Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, also use Chromium.

As a result, every Chromium browser offers more or less the same performance and Web compatibility. Indeed, this is a big part of why Microsoft made the switch: the company had grown tired of updating its own EdgeHTML engine to ensure it behaved identically to Chrome and is now offering Chrome-equivalent behavior in the most direct way possible. I've been using a version 74 build (which is a little out of date at this point) for the last week, and I have yet to see any difference between Edge and Chromium Dev when it comes to displaying Web pages. In principle, a page could treat Edge differently (it reports its identity as a rather ugly "Edg/74.1.96.14"; I'm presuming the misspelling is an attempt to ensure it isn't identified as a variation of the current Edge browser), but in general there's little reason to do so.

Enlarge / Kiosks from GTL, a leading video-visitation provider. (credit: GTL)

After April 15, inmates at the Adult Detention Center in Lowndes County, Mississippi will no longer be allowed to visit with family members face to face. Newton County, Missouri, implemented an in-person visitor ban last month. The Allen County Jail in Indiana phased out in-person visits earlier this year.

All three changes are part of a nationwide trend toward "video visitation" services. Instead of seeing their loved ones face to face, inmates are increasingly limited to talking to them through video terminals.

Even some advocates of the change admit that it has downsides for inmates and their families. Ryan Rickert, jail administrator at the Lowndes County Adult Detention Center, acknowledged to The Commercial Dispatch that inmates were disappointed they wouldn't get to see family members anymore. Advocates of this approach point to an upside for families: they can now make video calls to loved ones from home instead of having to physically travel to the jail.

Enlarge (credit: Maurizio Pesce Follow)

Researchers recently discovered a well-funded mobile phone surveillance operation that was capable of surreptitiously stealing a variety of data from phones running both the iOS and Android operating systems. Researchers believe the malware is so-called "lawful intercept" software sold to law-enforcement and governments.

Exodus, as the malware for Android phones has been dubbed, was under development for at least five years. It was spread in apps disguised as service applications from Italian mobile operators. Exodus was hidden inside apps available on phishing websites and nearly 25 apps available in Google Play. In a report published two weeks ago, researchers at Security without Borders said Exodus infected phones estimated to be in the "several hundreds if not a thousand or more."

Exodus consisted of three distinct stages. The first was a small dropper that collected basic identifying information about the device, such as the IMEI and phone number, and sent it to a command-and-control server. A second stage was installed almost immediately after the researchers’ test phone was infected with the first stage and also reported to a control server. That led researchers to believe all phones infected with stage one are indiscriminately infected with later stages.